Practical writing experience is generally regarded as an effective method of developing writing skills. Literature pertaining to the teaching of writing suggests that practice and critical evaluation may facilitate improvements in a students' writing abilities, specifically with regard to essay organization. In traditional writing classes, an instructor may provide this essay evaluation to the student. However, attending writing classes may be inconvenient and/or prohibitively expensive. In this regard, conventional automated essay scoring applications are now an established capability used from elementary school through graduate school for purposes of instruction and assessment.
Furthermore, conventional automated essay scoring applications are currently being used in standardized tests and entrance exams. However, in comparison to human evaluators, conventional automated essay scoring applications may not perform as well. One reason for this performance disparity may be related to differences in scoring methodology between human evaluators and conventional automated essay scoring applications. For example, human evaluators typically utilize a “holistic” scoring approach. In this approach, an essay may be read over quickly for an “overall” impression and readability, other criteria (e.g., grammar, mechanics, style, organization, development, vocabulary usage, etc.) may then be evaluated, and a final score may be based on a combination of these aspects. Using this holistic approach, evaluation performance is typically improved by increasing the number of criteria examined by the human evaluators.
Conversely, the evaluation performance of conventional automated essay scoring applications may decrease as the number of criteria examined is increased beyond a relatively low number of criteria. Therefore, conventional automated essay scoring applications may make use of a relatively small subset of possible criteria. This may, in turn, result in scoring anomalies and may account for the difference in scores between human evaluators and conventional automated essay scoring applications.